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Monday, August 23, 2010

Well, I've decided to move again. I know I've only been at Blogger for a month, but this is really the move I should have made in the first place.

Why Move Again?

In this post I explained why I made my original move from Edublogs. There I mentioned that I had considered hosting my own blog. My husband has a bunch of web space where he has his website kiwibytes.com. I looked into putting WordPress (open source blogging platform) onto your own web host, but it looked a little too techie for me. Luckily, about a week ago my husband decided that he wanted to set up a blog and at my suggestion he checked out WordPress. Within a few hours he had it up and running. He offered to set up WordPress for me too. Excellent!

What's In A Name?

I decided to purchase my own domain so that if I get flighty again and move, at least my web address will stay the same. So I went to GoDaddy and tried a bunch of names. Most of the dot com names I tried were taken. Claire.com, Clairethompson.com, ClarifyMe.com... I wasn't sure if the domain suffix was terribly important, but just to be certain I posed the question on Twitter (with some other good advice from @OakesMedia). In the end I decided that I would go with a .ca domain. I want this domain to be where I present my professional side. Initially it will house my blog but more may be added in time (CV, other websites...)

And The Winner Is...

So I decided to go with claireonline.ca. My blog name is still Clarify Me. If you're so inclined to add me to your RSS feed reader I promise I won't move again :-)

Thinking of Moving?

If you are thinking of moving your blog, do take the time to look into all the ins and outs. You don't want to be like me and have 3 blog homes in one month! I found that there is a lot of good information on how to import your blogger blog to wordpress and vice versa. Do be ready to clean up loose ends though, like broken internal links and dealing with the fact that blogger tags can get converted to categories in Wordpress. If you've moved before and have some good advice, please share it in the comments. Thinking of moving and have some questions--I'd be glad to answer any that I can.

People need time to get used to the technical aspects of an online conference

An organized social media campaign can help to disseminate information and create interest in your event

When using social media to promote your event remember the social part! You can't just use social media to advertise

Ensure that you respond to people who leave comments or questions about your event

Have a plan B--speakers may not show up; what will you do?

Ensure you have a support person (or people)

Try to use as many venues as possible to share information (YouTube, blipTV, Facebook, wiki, blog etc)

Make access easy (Sarah mentioned setting up a Facebook Fanpage as opposed to a Facebook group--this way people who do not have Facebook accounts can still access your Facebook content related to the event)

Consider mobile access to bring in more people, especially those in places where the infrastructure may not support this kind of event

Always provide links to World Clock or some similar tool so that it is easy for people in different time zones find out when your session is

I could write more, but I'll stop here. If you are planning on doing an online event, I strongly recommend reading the resources I've linked to above. Sarah has provided great info and reflections on running an online conference.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

This past week in the open Facilitating Online 2010 (FO2010) course our topic was What is Online Facilitation. One of the readings that really stood out for me this week was Gilly Salmon's 5 stages of moderation model. Gilly used a variety of ways to convey the role of facilitator and how it changes at the various stages that participants go through when learning on-line. Her use of a variety of visuals really helped to bring home her message. I plan to go back to this article again when I start facilitating a new group. I definitely recommend reading the article if you are planning to facilitate online.

Nancy White's Elluminate Session

Another standout from this week was the Elluminate session with Nancy White. I was not able to attend the session live, but really enjoyed the recording. One problem was that I kept wishing I could chime into the discussion! I have attended one of Nancy's sessions before and she does a wonderful job. Here are my notes from the session:

Volunteer Facilitators

Our volunteer facilitators, Carole and Sharon did a wonderful job. They started off by describing their prep for the session (they Skyped prior to discuss how they wished to do things, they entered the room early, they liaised with Nancy to see how she wanted the session to look), and they introduced themselves and Nancy. As the session progressed they did a good job of ensuring that those that wanted to speak got their opportunity, they welcomed latecomers, and they made sure that the session kept to the prearranged time (often a difficult thing to do!)

Diving In

Nancy started off by getting people to use the whiteboard to write down what they were most interested in learning in the session. Before doing this she polled the room to see who knew how to use the whiteboard and who didn't. There were a number who did not know how to use it, but instead of Nancy explaining how, she asked one of the group who said they did know how to explain to the group. She did this again later with regards to adding a new page to the whiteboard. I though this was a good way to do things--it allows the group members to share their knowledge. Spreading facilitation about the group!

Once everyone had written on the whiteboard she showed them how to move items around on the whiteboard to clarify things. One strategy is to allow different participants the opportunity to sort items on the whiteboard. She mentioned that sorting is an important facilitation tool. The use of colours and boxes (around similar ideas) can help too. She asked them to think about how the space feels for participants--was it chaotic, how did it feel if someone wrote in your text box or over your text? Then as an experiment she made everyone facilitators/moderators. From the feedback many people found this a great experience. Elluminate does look a little different when you have moderator privileges and of course you have control over many more things.

On the Importance of a Wingman

Nancy mentioned, and that has become clearer to me as I've attended more of the FO2010 sessions, that it can be crazy to try and facilitate a group by yourself (unless it is a group that has met many times and where many people in the group are de facto facilitators), you really need a wingman (wingperson?) The co-facilitator or helper is in a good position to see where there might be problems and step in to help them.

Chaos and Contraints

One of the themes that Nancy touched on was the tension between chaos and constraint. She had everyone draw on the whiteboard at the same time and for some it felt very chaotic, for some it was frustrating because their space was being invaded. She then set up constraints by way of putting a grid on the whiteboard and asking everyone to pick a square and draw inside the square. This was more organized, however for some participants this might feel too controlled. Part of the challenge of facilitating is striking the right balance between creative chaos and constraint. Context plays a big part in helping you to decide on this balance. A group that has met many times might be better able to handle the more chaotic approach, while with a one time meeting of a large group you may need to err more on the side of constraint.

Providing Summaries

When someone arrived late to the session Nancy welcomed them and asked someone to give a good 4 sentence summary of where the session was at. It was a good way to get the new person up to speed and a way for the group as a whole to think about what had been experienced so far. She also mentioned that recapping is an art and that if we wanted to see an example of an amazing recapper, to check out Jerry Michalski who hosts a YiTan call, which lasts approx 35min which he then recaps at the end. Nancy said that she tries not to do too much synthesizing for the group. The group then discussed the benefits of summarizing and one of the key things that came out of that discussion for me was that the summary should be brief and about the content, and we should not do the 'meaning making' for the participants. Also, when we give over to a participant the responsibility of summarizing it shows the other participants the importance of summarizing. This brought up the interesting question of 'What layers are we facilitating?' At the end of the session Nancy went back to the whiteboards and summarized the discussions the group had had and in particular she went back to an earlier screen where participants had written down what they were most interested in discussing and she asked them to put an x or a check next to each one to indicate whether they felt those items were discussed. This was a good way to review the objectives of the session.

Communities, Networks and Loose Connections

Another topic that came up was the distinction between Communities and Networks. Nancy talked about the fact that communities are bounded groups where we give up part of our 'me' identity to take on a 'we' identity. Communities often have a shared purpose or goal. Networks on the other hand have fuzzier boundaries or intersecting boundaries.

If you are facilitating a community you are going to have to do it differently than when you are facilitating a network. In networks there is often lots of choice and more diversity than in a community. In a network if there is a road bump or a problem you can avoid it or go around it. Communities don't scale--they can become too big to be effective. A problem of too much or too little control can kill a community. Communities, however, can be great at getting things accomplished. Nancy used the imagery of facilitation as network weaving. The area in between networks and communities are where you have looser connections. But these looser connections are often where interesting things occur. I wonder if this is the same as the idea of the strength of weak ties as per Mark Granovetter?

A Question

One thing I wondered about the Elluminate session was that some people had (profile) after their names and if you hovered your mouse over them a little box came up with their photo and bit of information about them. I thought this was a really neat tool--the rest of the people in the group become more real when you have a better sense of who they are. For example, I'm terrible with names, but if there is a photo of the person I am better able to remember who they are and to connect with them.

The Wrap Up

It was a good week. I'm learning a lot and connecting with more people in the FO2010 class. I look forward to what we'll learn this coming week. If you have any thoughts on what I've written I'd love to hear from you! As always, thanks for reading what I write.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

My blog title was the focus of this past week in the Facilitating Online course (FO2010). For a look at the resources we were asked to read/view this week check out this post on the class blog.

Community, networks, and what sits in between

I found the Nancy White video on Community, networks, and what sits in between very interesting. She distinguished between communities, which take time to build and nurture, where people (hopefully) make strong ties to each other to networks which tend to involve looser ties, people drop in and out, and they overlap with other networks. She maintains that the area in between the two is an area of real interest. I hope to learn more about this when she presents in the class Elluminate sessionnext week (open to non-class participants too!) After watching Nancy's video I realized that I have created an online learning network for myself, but many of the online communities I have joined have fizzled or I have dropped out of them. I think it is definitely more work to create, maintain, and participate in an online community.

to be effective, roles and responsibilities need to be clearly laid out

it helped to start off the team work with some face-to-face meetings

ensure that you use a variety of means to communicate; text (e-mail, Google groups or other discussion fora, blogs), audio (telephone, Skype) and visual (Skype, Elluminate).

This past year I have had experience with the difficulties when point number 1 is overlooked. It can be frustrating working in a virtual team when the roles and responsibilities are not clear. Work can be duplicated, feelings can be hurt. It only makes sense to spell things out. It doesn't mean that there can't be any flexibility, but it at least gives everyone a starting point.

Point number two just makes sense. It is so much easier to make a connection with someone if you've been able to meet them face-to-face. Then when you are communicating with them in the more limited (fewer dimensions) on-line environment you can relate them back to the real person.

Terry's presentation was the first one that involved volunteer facilitators from the class. Chris and Jillian stepped up to the plate and did a great job. They had spent some time before in Elluminate working with the moderator tools. They had clearly discussed with each other what their roles were going to be and they did a good job of dealing with issues and keeping the session moving along.

Synthesis

This week I've realized that I would like to make a number of changes to what I do. When I connect with my high school distributed learning students, most of whom learn asynchronously, I need to provide multiple ways to interact meaningfully. I current use e-mail, text messaging in Moodle (our Learning Management System) phone conversations, Elluminate, and face-to-face but I really need to step things up a notch with Elluminate and my face-to-face interactions.

Elluminate has been a struggle--with a small number of asynchronous students in the 13 plus courses that I am responsible for it has been challenging to come up with meaningful meetings. Every student is in a different place so offering lessons is difficult; who do you target? I have tried tutorials too, but because my students aren't part of a strong community it is a big risk to go online and say "I don't get this, please explain it to me." (The community aspect is a whole other post--so I'll leave that for now.)

So this is my recent brainstorm. My Elluminate sessions are going to allow me to be a math DJ . I will ask students to send me the questions they would like me to explain at least one hour prior to the session. When the session starts I will record it, but also see if I can stream it to UStream or a similar service so that students can observe without having to log in to Elluminate (they choose their level of interaction.) If students log into Elluminate, I will play their requests first (thus the DJ part of Math DJ), with the requests from students who aren't logged on going to the end of the queue. My hope is that students will get the math help they need, they will get it conveniently online, but there is a way to reduce the risk of putting yourself out there. Hopefully many students will become more comfortable with the technology and up their participation. Now I just need to find some good intro and outro music...

F2F

Face-to-face (F2F) group meetings have been difficult for many of the reasons I cited with Elluminate. In the past my colleague and I have offered a drop in tutorial session where we occasionally have small group lessons on core course ideas (eg grammar for Language Arts students, writing up and carrying out labs for Science students). It has not been particularly effective for a number of reasons; one of which is that it is optional for some students and mandatory for many students who are behind and/or have behavioural issues. This is not a good mix. This year I would like to separate the groups. The students who have an agreement that they must work x amount of hours in our building will be there at a different time from the drop in tutorial session (unless it is their choice to attend the tutorial). Hopefully students who attend the drop in tutorial are they because they (or their parent!) want to be there and they know that they will get help (and not have to wait for the teachers to deal with those students who do not want to be there).

In addition I would like to offer some stand alone face-to-face sessions called Math Gyms to engage students in basic problem solving in Math. I'd like to draw on some of the activities that Dan Meyer writes about in his What Can You Do With This? blog posts. The Math Gym would be multi-age and it would not cover specific aspects of the different Math curricula--but it would be an opportunity for students to work together on problem solving. Work on their Math muscles as it were.

The Wrap Up

Last week was a good week in FO2010 land. I've absorbed a lot and I think I can start to integrate this learning into my practice. If you have any suggestions on how to improve Elluminate and/or F2F sessions with asynchronous learners please let me know. My school year starts at the beginning of September so now is my time to plan so that I can hit the ground/internet running :-)

Friday, July 30, 2010

Earlier this week in the Facilitating Online 2010 course Sarah Stewart talked about how she uses her iGoogle page to stay organized and up to date on new posts from the FO2010 crew. She also asked if any of the participants used iGoogle and if we could share how we use it.

I created the following video on how I use iGoogle using Screenr and then published it to my YouTube channel. Here's the link to the video in case it is not showing up for you. I use iGoogle a lot. It is my own personal dashboard. I hope you get a sense of how useful I find it from my short (2:16) video.

This is my first time using Screenr. So far I have been pleased with it. It was easy to set up and easy to use. I haven't done a lot of screencasts before, but I liked using Screenr better than Jing (though Jing allows for screenshots, while Screenr does not). That's one thing I enjoy about taking a course like this; it encourages me to stretch my thinking and to try out new tools.

The Wrap Up

Do you use iGoogle? What are some of the differences in the way you use it? If you don't use iGoogle (or a similar tool) please feel free to ask questions about it in the comments.

Monday, July 26, 2010

To help me think about what I want to get out of Facilitating Online 2010 (FO2010), I created the following mind map in bubbl.us The map is quite large so you will have to drag with your mouse to see all of the map. Here's the link to the map if it is not showing up below.

This is the first time that I have used an online mind mapping tool. I was inspired by the mindmeister mindmap on Online Communities that Sarah Stewart tweeted about last week. I decided to try bubbl.us after polling my twitter network (thanks network!)

The Task This Week in FO2010

For this week Sarah has asked us to make a plan for what we want to learn and explore. Here are the four questions that we've been asked to answer:

What do you want to learn to facilitate? Online professional development for teachers. I'd like to work on a model for professional development in my school district that fosters ongoing professional development. I see this as involving a face-to-face component as well as synchronous online meetings using Elluminate and possibly Moodle as a place to archive and collaborate on learning. (Thinking Moodle because would like to see more teachers in my district using it, but am also aware that a more open environment can result in even more amazing connections and learning.) One possible format would be 'Tech Tuesdays' style 20-30 minute weekly Elluminate Live meetings on a specific topic. Another possible format is LAN parties as outlined by North Vancouver's Bryan Hughes.

What are you doing now in terms of online facilitation? I'm a distributed learning teacher with the majority of my courses being online in Moodle. I offer my students weekly Elluminate tutorials (these are poorly attended and an area in which I am trying to improve.) I have volunteered as an assistant facilitator with Know Weeks and CEET. Both organizations offer(ed) week long online courses geared towards K-12 educators in British Columbia, Canada. Both Know Weeks and CEET used Moodle.

What would you like to achieve, change, or do more of? I would like to improve student participation and engagement in my Elluminate tutorials. I would like to initiate online professional development in my school district.

What do you need to do or make happen to acheive your goal? I need to practice facilitating in a safe environment before attempting to promote and facilitate an online professional development session on my own.

Feedback

Have you facilitated your own online events before? What advice would you offer to someone who is planning to offer their first online event? Are there some definite dos and don'ts?

I'd recommend placing your marker in a general spot, like 'Vancouver' as opposed to a specific address like '3614 West 16th Ave, Vancouver'. I had seen this done before when I (briefly) participated in CCK08. Rod Lucier created a similar map and posted on how to add your marker to the map. I've included his video here. If you follow his instructions it will work on our FO2010 map.

About Me

I am a teacher at a distributed learning (DL) school in Penticton, BC, Canada. My subject areas are grade 8 - 10 Math and Science and grade 11 - 12 Biology.
I have been teaching since '98 and this is my fourth year teaching in a DL program.
I've always been interested in technology, but now that I am teaching in a DL program, I am using technology more and more.